Huygens: The Man Behind the Principle
Huygens: The Man Behind the Principle

Author: C. D. Andriesse

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2005-08-25

Total Pages: 492

ISBN-13: 9780521850902

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Huygens: The Man Behind the Principle is the story of the great seventeenth-century Dutch mathematician and physicist, Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695). As the first complete biography ever written this book describes in detail how Huygens arrived at discoveries and inventions that are often wrongly ascribed to Newton. Huygens played a key role in the 'scientific revolution', and the Huygens Principle on the wave theory of light helped establish his reputation. The discovery of Saturn's rings and the invention of the pendulum clock made him so famous that he was invited to be the first director of the French Academy of Science, but his life as director teetered on the edge of powerlessness. Despite Huygens' many achievements no complete biography has previously been published in English. This book gives scientists and historians the opportunity to learn more about all aspects of Huygens' life while bringing his story to a wider audience.

Material Histories of Time
Material Histories of Time

Author: Gianenrico Bernasconi

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2020-12-16

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 3110625032

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The historiography of timekeeping is traditionally characterized by a dichotomy between research that investigates the evolution of technical devices on the one hand, and research that is concerned with the examination of the cultures and uses of time on the other hand. Material Histories of Time opens a dialogue between these two approaches by taking monumental clocks, table clocks, portable watches, carriage clocks, and other forms of timekeeping as the starting point of a joint reflection of specialists of the history of horology together with scholars studying the social and cultural history of time. The contributions range from the apparition of the first timekeeping mechanical systems in the Middle Ages to the first evidence of industrialization in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The Antonio II Badile Album of Drawings: The Origins of Collecting Drawings in Early Modern Northern Italy
The Antonio II Badile Album of Drawings: The Origins of Collecting Drawings in Early Modern Northern Italy

Author: Evelyn Karet

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 359

ISBN-13: 1351546678

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Evelyn Karet's in-depth study of the Antonio II Badile Album - the earliest known example of an art collection pasted onto the pages of a book - is both focused and broad in its appeal to those interested in the early modern era. The provenance of the album is traced from its assemblage to the seventeenth-century collection of Conte Lodovico Moscardo to its dismantling by the dealer Francis Matthiesen in the 1950s, establishing that the volume conserved in the Frits Lugt Collection is not an original but a replica produced by Matthiesen. Although Antonio II must be celebrated as the collector of the drawings, new paleographic analysis has identified the actual compiler of the album after Antonio?s death providing a terminus post quem in the late 1530s or early 1540s. Karet enlarges the focus from the album itself to the historic tradition of collecting drawings in northern Italy in the early modern era before Vasari, for which the album provides a new point of reference. Throughout the book, Karet discusses the Badile family, examines the individual drawings in the book, investigates the contacts between artists and humanists, their rich, diverse collections and the humanist mind-set that fostered the appreciation of drawings. She explores notable early drawing collections in northern Italy and the role of northern Italy as a center of collection in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The book concludes with two appendices: a reconstruction of the original album, including a discussion of the reconstruction process, suggestions about what the album originally looked like, and a page-by-page guide to its contents; and a detailed analysis of Francis Matthiesen's career. This book opens up new areas of inquiry into an overlooked subject.

No Shadow of a Doubt
No Shadow of a Doubt

Author: Daniel Kennefick

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2021-03-09

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 0691217157

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On their 100th anniversary, the story of the extraordinary scientific expeditions that ushered in the era of relativity In 1919, British scientists led extraordinary expeditions to Brazil and Africa to test Albert Einstein's revolutionary new theory of general relativity in what became the century's most celebrated scientific experiment. The result ushered in a new era and made Einstein a global celebrity by confirming his dramatic prediction that the path of light rays would be bent by gravity. Today, Einstein's theory is scientific fact. Yet the effort to weigh light by measuring the gravitational deflection of starlight during the May 29, 1919, solar eclipse has become clouded by myth and skepticism. Could Arthur Eddington and Frank Dyson have gotten the results they claimed? Did the pacifist Eddington falsify evidence to foster peace after a horrific war by validating the theory of a German antiwar campaigner? In No Shadow of a Doubt, Daniel Kennefick provides definitive answers by offering the most comprehensive and authoritative account of how expedition scientists overcame war, bad weather, and equipment problems to make the experiment a triumphant success. The reader follows Eddington on his voyage to Africa through his letters home, and delves with Dyson into how the complex experiment was accomplished, through his notes. Other characters include Howard Grubb, the brilliant Irishman who made the instruments; William Campbell, the American astronomer who confirmed the result; and Erwin Findlay-Freundlich, the German whose attempts to perform the test in Crimea were foiled by clouds and his arrest. By chronicling the expeditions and their enormous impact in greater detail than ever before, No Shadow of a Doubt reveals a story that is even richer and more exciting than previously known.

The Astronomical Clock of Strasbourg Cathedral
The Astronomical Clock of Strasbourg Cathedral

Author: Günther Oestmann

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-04-20

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 9004423478

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Strasbourg Cathedral’s astronomical clock is one of the most famous monuments to Time in the world. No other clock has been described and appreciated so often and in such a myriad of ways. There were three clocks built consecutively within the cathedral: the earlier fourteenth century clock has left little trace; a second clock was realized in 1570-1574; while the nineteenth century clock began as a proposal for repairs, but was intended by its maker as a replacement clock. This book gives a detailed outline of the artistic and technical components of the second clock, much of which survives, and it describes the astronomical indications and its underlying conceptual framework. The author has discovered a hitherto disregarded contemporary statement that the clock displays four ways of determining the ascendant as described by Ptolemy. He also shows that the Strasbourg clock is the result of a highly original reception of the architectural theory of Vitruvius and other mathematical and mechanical texts of Late Antiquity. Revised and updated translation from the German edition Die Straßburger Münsteruhr: Funktion und Bedeutung eines Kosmos-Modells des 16. Jahrhunderts. Published by GNT-Verlag in 1993. See inside this book.